Bullies
by Pinkie Tuscadaro
Summary: Some of the bullying moments in the childhoods of Leonard, Sheldon, and Howard.
1. Chapter 1

Sheldon

East Texas-1990

He never knew how it came to this, and it was partly due to his inability to sense and understand social cues. Cornered after school at the edges of the school yard, no one was around to help him. He looked at his attackers, boys his own age but not as thin, not as clumsy, certainly not as smart.

"How smart do you think you are now, Sheldon?" One of them asked, the ring leader, the head bully. He was standing in front of him while two others were holding his arms behind his back.

"My intelligence still exceeds yours, and always will, since you don't even understand the most rudimentary equations-"

That was all it took. The ring leader scowled, perhaps feeling some of the inferiority that Sheldon was pointing out, but anger eclipsed that or was caused by it, and he punched Sheldon as hard as he could right in the stomach, and Sheldon doubled over in pain, unable to breathe.

Leonard

New Jersey-1992

Leonard understood social cues, and by 12 years old had learned to hide the bulk of his intelligence from the masses, but it didn't help. He was still small and bespeckled, he was still timid and easily made to be the target of the other boys.

It was a chase, a chase that he was destined to lose. They were bigger and stronger and faster, and all his calculations lead him to one conclusion. He would be caught and tortured in some way.

He ran down the halls of the school. Everyone had left, most everyone. The halls looked dusty and unused when no one was there. He could hear them gaining, heard their sneakers on the polished linoleum. He could feel his breath tearing in and out of his lungs, felt the dizziness starting, felt himself longing for his inhaler. He couldn't stop to use it now. He ran on.

He rounded one last corner and he could hear them, right behind him now, and then he felt the strong hand on the back of his jacket, and he was yanked backwards with such force that he fell back and landed on his butt.

"Thought you could outrun us?" one of his antagonizers asked, looking sadly amused. Leonard shook his head, no, he hadn't thought that. Hoped he could, perhaps, but he didn't think it at all.

He was dragged to a locker and they shoved him inside of it, he was small enough to fit.

He heard the raucous laughter and felt the walls of the locker closing in on him, and it wasn't helping his asthma one bit. He could see some light from the slats at the top of the locker, but he felt the darkness around him trying to suffocate him. He heard the footsteps receding and he banged on the inside of the locker, hoping it would just pop open. No such luck. So he banged on the door of the locker and starting yelling and screaming for help. There had to be some late working teacher or a janitor still within ear shot.

Howard

Pasadena, California-1993

Howard sat on the steps of the school, waiting for his mother. His father had recently left them, and since then Mrs. Wollowitz hadn't been the greatest at remembering to pick up her son. Food and cheap wine and soap operas were killing her pain, and Howard understood that to some extent, although his father's absence had more to do with him in his mind, more to do with him than his mother. He wasn't what his father wanted or expected, he wasn't a jock, he wasn't sturdy, he was barely healthy. He was skinny and prone to every cold and infection that made its way to southern California. Did his fierce and burning intelligence make up for this? Not in his father's mind, apparently.

But there were still other things to worry about besides his father's absence. He knew this and remembered to worry about them now as he saw one of his prime antagonists making his way toward him.

"Hey, guys, what's up?" Howard said, seeing that there were others appearing from behind bushes and stairwells. He stood up, backing away, but steadily chattering, pretending that he was cool, that maybe that would fool them. Howard viewed the other kids at his school as dim witted, their minds slow to make connections. But fooling them in this way didn't work, and in some way he also understood that they could only feel like a part of the group by excluding other people, namely him. He was scrawny, he was weak, he was hopelessly out of style, he was intelligent in a way that was nerdy at best and ridiculous at worst. So he gave up his chatter and turned and ran, knowing that it wouldn't take long for them to catch him and descend, like a pack of wolves devouring a lamb.


	2. Chapter 2

Amy

Loneliness seemed a form of bullying. She'd rather be chased and hit then left alone. The kids at the school parted like the red sea for her, leaving her to walk in her own sacred dry aisle.

There was no one to talk to. On the few occasions she has tried to strike up a conversation somewhere, in the lunchroom or on the playground she has been met with blank stares with an underlying hostility.

So she sits alone and she eats alone and in the rows of desks in the classrooms no one leans over to talk to her and no one tosses a folded up little note on her desk. She looks with longing and envy at the girls who lean toward each other, their hair touching and the colors mixing, and they smile and laugh. Amy goes home and cries.

Sheldon

He's never sure about the precipitant for these beatings. The other kids might take offense to what he is saying, if they can even understand it. Perhaps they understand, if nothing else, that their intelligence will never even come close to his, and in their subconscious it makes them angry and jealous, and that results in this violence.

Held down, muscles tensed, he knew he was going to get hit. He knew he couldn't get away. It bothered him while it was occurring, and that was it. He didn't internalize it in any way, and was unable to take the steps to prevent it from happening again. His oblivious arrogance protected him.

Leonard

Nothing protected Leonard. He had intelligence that nearly equaled Sheldon's, but at 13 he had none of his arrogance, and none of his obliviousness. Leonard was painfully aware.

He was painfully aware that he was nerdy, geeky, that his small stature and thick glasses and his interests made him an outcast. He understood that the cool and popular people needed to have people to exclude. If there was no one to exclude what made them cool? He knew he fulfilled that function in the societal microcosm of middle school.

And when he ran from the kids with the glitter of violence in their eyes he knew that there was no way to prevent this, that time and the eventual maturing of these clueless kids would be the only thing that would change it.

Time, the inevitable wearing of the years and the maturing of bullies, this was small comfort to a 13 year old who was out of breath and out of rope, and the kids in their cool clothes and limited intellect descended upon him.

Penny

Penny was the most complicated of all. Sheldon almost went out of his way to anger the kids in his vicinity, the kids at school and in his neighborhood. It was almost no wonder he was beat up. A =B. But Penny, in her school years, her blond hair framing her heart shaped face, her green eyes glowing under blue eye shadow, Penny was what some girls desperately wanted to be. The skinny girls with no shape, stick figures draped in loose clothes, and the pudgy girls who ate after school to fill the holes. These girls looked at her blond hair and perfect nose and full cupid lips, and they looked at the boys looking at her, and they wanted it. Penny was never mean, never said cruel and cutting words to the girls who envied her and the boys who wanted her. But she had a way of excluding people, subtle and damaging, that defied description.

It was eighth grade and half of the kids were talking about the party they were going to, and the other half squirmed in their seats and wondered what was wrong with them that they didn't get invited. Penny had orchestrated the whole party, the location, the alcohol and the pot that would be there, and who exactly would come and who wouldn't. In school, at her desk, she gazed with innocent eyes at the outcasts who simply did not make the cut.

Stuart

While the teachers talked he drew. While they droned on and on about subjects he could care less about he made worlds in his notebooks, worlds filled with cracking and crumbling sidewalks, many legged and antennae-d creatures, hunched over witches and wizards, exploding suns, cargo ships hurtling toward doom.

Stuart had a strategy in school, in the halls filled with kids twice his size, on the playgrounds, in the lunchroom. He laid low, he was unobtrusive. No one bothered with him because no one noticed him.

Howard

In the days after his father left he didn't care about the kids at school circling like vultures, didn't care if he'd get chased and forced to the ground, dirt getting in his mouth. He stared out the window, half thinking his father might come back.

Leonard

Furiously writing a paper on the quantum substructure of cosmic dust, he thought if this paper was insightful and astounding he might finally live up to the rest of the members of his family.

Sheldon

He was 11, and in his last year living at his house and going to school with people his age. They were his age, they were in no way his peers. It was a good thing he would be starting college in the fall. He didn't know how much more of this he could stand.

He was sitting in his living room, his bangs hanging straight across his forehead, so long they were nearly in his eyes. He was listening to the conversations that were going on between his mother, sister, father, and brother. He was silent, listening, unable to believe that he was related to any of these people. He knew what they were saying, things about football and dances and soap operas, but he had no idea why.


End file.
